When listening to people discuss firearms, there is an enormous amount of disconnect from accuracy. If the discussion were represented by a bulls-eye target there would be very few shots in the bulls-eye, a few more in the nine and eight rings and on out, with lots of shots barely on paper, and plenty of shots taken by the legs of the target holder, feet below the target itself. So, I am going to take it from the very basics on up to sophisticated systems. I say that with a bit of my tongue in cheek, and I hope by the time I’m finished you will know why. Please excuse me, you gun guys if I go too fast and am not as nuanced as you would like, but I am not doing this for you. I am doing it for the overwhelming majority of the people out there whose knowledge of firearms ranges from almost nothing to the range of knowledge getting to where you gun guys feel like I have giver the average guy a better idea of how things work and what is being talked about.
Here we go. Take a piece of pipe. We will now call that a barrel. there are two ends on our barrel. One of them will be where our projectile being fired exits the barrel. That will be called the muzzle end of our barrel. Now, a bit of physics. Gun powder, when it burns, creates hot, expanding gas with a relatively great amount of energy. As you know, gases expand in all directions. Alright, we are going to close the other end of our barrel. In this case we are going to screw a end cap on it. Then we drill a very small hole in the end cap. Now we have a barrel. Imagine a cannon on a pirate ship, and all our barrel needs is some way to hold it and point it. That handle of our very basic fire arm will be called the stock. I want to point out that I have not made any mention of size of our now complete barrel and stock. We have a barrel, and a way to hold it and point it, a stock. This is a firearm. That simple. All we have to do now is put some gun powder in our barrel to create the hot expanding gases and our projectile on top on it to be propelled down the barrel and out in the direction the muzzle is pointed. That little hole we put in the end cap is how we will be able to get a bit of fire, or spark, from the outside of our barrel to the waiting powder inside. When that happens, the projectile is forced out of the barrel by the gas.
What I have described is called a muzzle loader. Ways to get the fire to the powder evolved. Eventually, a little bit of powder was put into a little metal cap that could be put over that hole in our closed end of our barrel. When those caps were hit by a little hammer, they sparked and the powder in our barrel would “fire”. So, at this time I want you to know that everything that we will be talking about are called firearms for this reason. There are many types of firearms. Firearms worn on or near one’s side are called side arms and those that are longer and carried in our hands, are called long arms. Generally speaking think one hand to hold is a side arm.
So, our fire arm we have made is a muzzle loader. It fires one time and then we have to “reload” it. Pouring gunpowder down the barrel and then pushing a projectile down on top of the gunpowder takes a little bit of time. So, someone decided it was easier to put the powder and projectile/bullet into a this paper “cartridge” that could be pushed down the barrel. So, I want you to remember that word, cartridge.
Cartridges made reloading muzzleloaders much quicker. But still, if you are being attacked the time it takes to reload is life or death at times. In 1835, a man named Sam Colt applied for a patent for a new sidearm. He had put a cylinder of metal at the end of the barrel where our cap had been. The cylinder had holes drilled into it which could hold powder and a round, lead bullet. one was “loaded” at time, until it was full, and it had six places built in to it. Caps were placed on each, at the ready. This pistol was called a revolver. Each time the trigger was pulled, the hammer came down and fired. When the hammer was pulled back another of the six positions came into align with the barrel and the now “cocked” hammer. All of a sudden, a man could fire six times as fast as he could cock the hammer and pull the trigger. THIS IS IMPORTANT! This is the first firearm to put another loaded “round” into place simple by cocking and pulling the trigger. It wasn’t completely automatic, because the hammer had to be manually pulled back first. But, the “fire power” a man could hold in one hand was a giant leap forward. This was a Single Action pistol. With the single action of pulling the hammer back, it was ready to fire with the next pull of the trigger. It didn’t take long to figure out how to make the pulling of the trigger able to make the hammer cock and release. The two actions combined made this type of pistol called a Double Action pistol. It could shoot 6 times as fast as a person could pull the trigger. THIS IS IMPORTANT! A firearm that fires once for every time the trigger is called a semi-automatic(NOT AN AUTOMATIC!). The Double Action revolver is a semi-automatic weapon, but isn’t called that because of it’s original design, and revolver gets close enough in the minds of people who know.
Before I get any further, those “cartridges” improved, too. Instead of paper, the were made of brass that could be reused. They poured at little extra easy to spark powder into the bottom of the brass cartridge that went around the inside bottom rim of the brass. When the brass cartridge was struck, it began the fire completely inside the cartridge. Eventually, as cartridges became more powerful they used a place built into the bottom of the brass case into which a primer(like the caps described above)was pressed These are what are called Center Fired cartridges. So, a cartridge today for a high-powered cartridge is the brass(usually) case, the primer pressed into it, containing a specific amount and type of gunpowder, and a bullet pressed into place.
In 1911, a man named Browning designed a new way of automatically loading another cartridge very quickly. It was ingenious to say the least. It used the same energy from the hot gas of the cartridge to kind of push our end cap in our basic barrel me had made at the beginning backwards at the same time the bullet was being pushed forward and out of the muzzle end. When the barrel was pushed back the empty brass case was allowed to be blown out of the firearm and a spring pushed it back to its original position, but with an unfired cartridge pushed into place from a “magazine”(a place to hold more unused cartridges) below. It Automatically fired each time it shoved a fresh cartridge into place. THAT IS WHAT AN AUTOMATIC WEAPON IS! You pull the trigger one time and it fires AUTOMATICALLY until the supply of cartridges runs out, or the trigger is released. When the trigger is released and returned to the forward position it stops the firing of the weapon. So, he put a switch on it to allow you to fire it each time you pulled the trigger by automatically putting another cartridge into place to fire. That is called SEMI-AUTOMATIC fire. The other position on the switch was AUTOMATIC FIRE. As you can imagine, armies all over the world lined up to buy AUTOMATIC weapons. But, they burn through cartridges and are not exactly pinpoint accurate when firing that way that automatic fire had very limited usefulness. Hunters had no use for automatic fire as it pretty much takes the aiming and skill out of the sport. There was another group that could see the advantage of automatic fire. Gangsters. It quickly became apparent that allowing gangsters, murderers for a living to have automatic weapons was a problem. So, automatic weapons were made illegal for civilians unless they had a specific reason for having such a weapon. Basically impossible for the average person to get.
But, the ways to make the trigger pull quickly are limited only by imagination. For those thinking that any device that does that can be outlawed, I want you to know that the same backwards and forwards action, with a little practice can be used to do the same thing using a belt loop on a pair of pants. The sliding butt stocks used by the murderer in Las Vegas used the backwards action and a spring to provide the way to pull the trigger quickly. SO, the murderer had legal to own SEMI-Automatic weapons. The bump stocks and other mechanical devices used to pull the trigger quickly have not been banned. As you can imagine, they rush to ban these will be made quickly.
I have given you some basic knowledge of firearms in order for you to better understand what is being talked about. I do this because you will hear the word automatic weapons used a whole lot by people who are wrong. Watch for it, and if someone is using Automatic to describe a semi-automatic firearm they are either not informed or they are purposely misleading for a reason. One is ignorant and the other is deceitful, both are not to be trusted.
I have tried to give you straight information without any bias. I hope this has been of some service in helping to make discussions just a little more accurate. I would like to think that if you paid attention you could at least hit the target and score some points, speaking accurately.
